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Democrats elect to walk out over voter ID proposal

Dissension under the Dome

Posted: Saturday, March 12, 2005

By Brandon LarrabeeMorris News Service

ATLANTA - Democrats staged walkouts in both the House and the Senate on Friday night to protest a bill that would require voters to present photo identification before casting their ballots in Georgia elections.

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The boycott began in the upper chamber after a vote to require photo identification at polling places. Some Democratic senators, including all of the black members of the upper chamber, then marched out of the chamber in outrage.

Other Democrats followed.

"We're going to a least let them know that we support them," said state Sen. Michael Meyer von Bremen of Albany as he and all but one of the remaining Democrats in the chamber left the room.

Republicans presented the bill as a common-sense measure to guard against voting fraud.

"It bothered me when I started looking into this that you can take a utility bill ... in Georgia and vote," said state Sen. Cecil Staton, the Macon Republican who sponsored the bill.

But Democrats decried the measure as a step backward for civil rights, sponsored by the same party that had liberated the slaves.

"This is not the party of Lincoln, this is the part of Lott," said Senate Minority Leader Robert Brown, D-Macon. Trent Lott is the former GOP leader of the U.S. Senate, who was forced to resign his post after suggesting that the country would have been better off had it elected Strom Thurmond when he ran on a segregationist platform in the 1940s.

Democrats in the House also staged a walkout after a similar vote in the House.

In the Senate, the walkout lasted 25 minutes, with Democrats returning to vote on a controversial measure to allow the state to fund religious programs that serve the needy.

"We just wanted them to know that we don't have to sit there and take that," said state Sen. Regina Thomas, D-Savannah.

A more expansive bill on elections, originally sponsored by state Rep. Sue Burmeister, R-Augusta, also passed the House. That measure included similar restrictions on the identification needed to vote.

House Democrats tried several parliamentary procedures to delay the vote. When those failed, they cast their votes and then went into the hall, singing.

Democrats were gone for a few moments before returning to the House chamber.